Authors: Candia McWilliam
I wondered if he had contained much blood when he was found.
Did her ankles swell? Did she know peaches contained a natural anti-nauseant?
‘Spring baby, then?’ he said.
With her baby not yet born, she was unfamiliar with mortality. People with children live with it. She may well have considered Lucas indemnified by the narrowness of his escape. She had no idea that death is not only there when he leaps through the trapdoor with his invitation to dine. She had not observed him conscientiously paying his respects to the virtuous, the healthy and the brave, who invariably meet him as he slips in uninvited.
‘Spring baby, just about an April fool,’ said Cora, looking at him with the trust women reserve for doctors. Most of my friends fall in love with their gynaecologists; one or two had large numbers of children in order to re-experience this passion. Had Cora fallen in love with Lucas only because she was pregnant and he was a doctor? If you asked me, it must have something to do with her childhood. That capacious psychoanalyst’s toybox full of dolls with lifted skirts and one-legged soldiers, what a lot it is made to hold.
‘But no winter wedding,’ said someone. The voice was mine. I had uttered my first sentence of love and commiseration to my best friend who was lying before me, irrigated and drained artificially, having undergone a violent attack under ground not long before. My best friend who was just not dead.
‘Thank God someone has a proper sense of scale,’ said Lucas. ‘Lying here, you have no idea what it’s like, they think that life and death are matters of life and death. All along the small things are more terrible. Like buttons,’ he said, and looked suddenly very tired. His eyelids lowered for a time. I honestly think that his body did not contain the power to keep them raised. Where his head lay, at an angle to his body, bandages began. They were covered with a pyjama jacket. The cloth was coarse. It was striped, blue and white, the pyjamas of farce, hospital issue, worn like the burglar’s t-shirt and the pirate’s patch, to identify him – he was an ill man, a man in bed. Why was he wearing them? Were they holed for the ingress of tubes? Were they a dickey, like the evening shirt of a corpse, off to meet his maker? Those striped pyjamas had a grim levity which reminded me again that Lucas was not only alone but in a foreign land. Those photographs of sexless pyjamaed people are a tragedy in the dress of bedroom farce. I suppose the stripes were for visibility if the skeletons tried to move.
We looked at each other, Cora and I. I was pleased with her. She had done nothing at all remarkable, she was simply having a baby, but I saw it, quite as surely as the sacs aloft on aerials, transfusing pleasure into Lucas. The creature knitting together inside Cora, fed by its thin nutritious cord, was a reason for Lucas to let himself be nourished back to life.
I think he slept for five minutes. We did not speak for fear of disturbing him. The silence between us was not uneasy. Up to this last time together, Cora had an edgy relation with silence, I had thought, as though it were a waste of time, time during which she could be putting herself over. I have always thought this a vain exercise, since a character will reveal itself anyhow, and only a great actor, a great spy or a truly guileless soul can neutralise the truth-telling of the face in repose. Cora looked down at Lucas.
Hero-worship, I suppose it was. We are asked to feel it for our leaders in war, and in peace people who sing or are beautiful are raised up for the young to worship. God takes a back seat, letting himself be driven by bad but brightly uniformed chauffeurs. The intense desire to emulate and to follow, which is there from birth, is a dangerous one. She looked at this sleeping pale man with a regard of fierce obedience; she did have a look of a religious fanatic. She had chosen him as her personal despot, or at least master. Was I jealous? Of either of them? I think not. I was certain of his affection, and from her I did not want hero-worship. It would have been in more danger of becoming a romance than I cared for. Oppie is right when she says that these things between an older and a younger woman sooner or later degenerate into fights about bangles and face cream. Besides, I was coming to care for Cora. I wanted to behave well to her and see good done her. Private education, private health, why not, for Cora, a private hero? Even God, I notice from those colourful wayside pulpits (a prayer for the morning, Lord make me crisp and ready to serve), has gone private, though the soft word used is Personal. I suppose this means that we no longer need to go round to His house when we want to speak to Him. Myself, I have found Him a jealous God, and not fond of going out.
The room where we sat at either side of Lucas’s bed was white, and uncurtained. Its blinds were a razor of grey. A description which would fit many of my London rooms, the difference being only deployment of resources. Where I had paintings, the bagged liquor of priceless life decorated this room. What I spent on flowers in a week could have purchased the aluminium cot, with its black feet, and the two chairs covered with mossy cretonne. The thin small sheets I have mentioned smelt of bleach. I could see they were rough as cheap paper, the sort of paper they wrap delicatessen food in on the Continent. Everything was washed, none of it looked clean, because there was no time for the refinements which draw attention to cleanliness in the lives of the rich; redundant napery, unneeded whiteness.
A black face and arm came around the door. The flattened hand beat twice on the flush wood, showing a pink underside sudden like a cat’s yawn.
‘Tea, ladies?’ asked the nurse. ‘The sleeping beauty is living on kisses only just at the moment.’
She indicated that she meant Lucas, and in the same moment, like a soldier who is afraid of protocol the instant after saving a life senior in rank to his, she looked wary, as though we might tell him that she had gone too far.
When he woke up, or came round, we were doing a dumb show of thanks to the nurse, whose legs were darker than her stockings, shining through like some beautiful patinated wood. Cora was indicating that the biscuits were just the thing for feeding two. In the very short time since she had told me about the baby, she seemed to have come to the state which is to be desired for pregnant women. She was enjoying it. She was even showing off about it. Perhaps the baby had taken over. Unborn, we are full of common sense.
‘There is a chemical to stop me being thirsty,’ he said. ‘Undistinguished vintage, but acceptable.’
‘Do you get a dry mouth?’ I asked.
‘Anne, how nice you are. Yes, but they don’t give me stones to suck. Did you get burning ears? I thought about you a lot.’
‘Is it like drowning?’ I asked. I was not thinking of my Alexander, but I saw him flinch, as though for any pain
I
might have felt. I wondered whether he could be a saint.
‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said. ‘I mean, I have never drowned, but I expect drowning’s nicer, not so confusing.’ The nurse came in and they spoke. Because we were there, from tact I think, she addressed him in very technical language and he responded in the same way, as though they were adults and we children, not let into the secrets of pain. She reached in under the light blanket and short sheet, both arms braced at right angles to her body. As though she were a fork-lift truck, she lifted and raised and redeposited Lucas, more comfortably, in his bed. He flinched when she withdrew her arms. It was done as though he weighed nothing. She smiled at him with the fat beneath her eyes and her pleated lower lip; it was a collusive smile; it congratulated him. He must have been in pain. I thought of what Lucas had said to me once about the stiff upper lip. ‘The stiffness spreads to the brain in most well-bred Englishmen, but never reaches the one part where it might be useful.’
Cora had eaten the biscuits. Each had borne the words ‘Healthy Life’. Healthy Life biscuits are like Five Boys chocolate, a food which makes moral claims, not the Fabian claims of muesli but the empire-building claims seen as a rule only on over-vividly revived advertising hoardings of the Edwardian summer. Made in Scotland, these biscuits must be part of some deal of the government. Perhaps a few biscuit workers were staying in work on account of having to supply a big London hospital? Or maybe Healthy Life biscuits had been bought by a conscience-stricken tobacco company? They look like old impacted horse-droppings, a good stalky chew. I have them at Stone.
‘
Was
it confusing?’ asked Cora.
‘You sound like the police, keen to know but terrified to ask. Very. I still do not know what to think.’
‘What do you mean? Surely you can only think “Thank God I am alive”,’ she said.
‘I haven’t reached that stage. I am not yet sure I am. But seeing you two has made me want to be.’
Did he mean that he still might die? Did he mean that he would be crippled? It sounded as though he considered himself as good as dead. He was polite, like a man of substance going into exile.
‘The baby most of all,’ he said. ‘I can’t help wondering what it will look like.’
I was alarmed at this. He was clearly expecting a new little Hal, who could be nurtured and groomed. Had he not been laid so low, I would have said something to fight this. There is something sinister in the grooming from birth of sexual playthings; it can backfire. I am sure that the inventor of the stoneless peach choked to death on a cherry stone, and the thornless rose’s breeder very likely fell on his sword. Since he evidently assumed that the baby was Hal’s, I also assumed that he wanted the wedding to go on.
‘Can you answer me about the wedding?’ I asked. I sounded shrill, but Cora was so obviously honeymooning with her idol and her baby that I felt I must nag.
‘It won’t happen,’ he said.
‘But,’ I interrupted, though my heart was not in the objection, ‘postponing it will just cause twice the work, all the cancelling and revoking and reinviting and . . .’ There is a plateau reached by the nagging voice when any words may be used at all because the hearer has ceased to listen.
‘It’s not to be postponed, darling. It won’t happen,’ he said.
I would reserve my anger for later. He had lit this feeble candle for Hal and Cora and now he snuffed it out. I was pleased at the extinction, angry at his godlike way of achieving it.
‘What if they want it?’ I almost shouted.
‘It is clear why she wants it and he may not have it. That is that. Trust me. I have asked my secretary to be at your disposal while you dismantle it. The little Afghan boy is mending well. I have had to put off my own work until later, the new year. She will have some spare time. Please do not have the wedding flowers sent to hospitals. They will be too funereal. I am so sorry, Cora, if you love him. But if, as I think I see, you just wanted to shelter your baby, take shelter with me. I am sorriest for Hal’s mother. But she may like the fuss. You must be the villainess, Cora.’
‘I’ll have to be, I can’t find Hal, so we’ve no villain.’
‘Oh,’ he said. Around his mouth was a white line, and he swallowed. His Adam’s apple was like a swallowed elbow. I saw again the jovial and institutional pyjamas. ‘Very dehydrated people cannot spare the water to weep,’ he said, ‘so I can tell you that you won’t see him for a while. None of us will.’ He spoke as though Hal were dead. I did not like that idea. I did not care to enrol Hal among my glorious dead. See, I am even exclusive about death.
Cora yodelled – ‘What do you mean, I’m marrying him, I’m not marrying him I mean, in two days?
Where
is he and how do you know?’ She could not make her curiosity resemble concern for Hal.
‘I don’t know where he is and I haven’t the heart to tell you how I know. I’m sorry to be mysterious, but I am in the dark.’ I saw the undone button of his blue and white pyjamas. Outside the hospital window was the blue sky, violet at its height. One satellite hung, too bright to be a star.
‘Prisoners and people in hospital call it the sky,’ he said. He had seen that I wanted to leave. ‘I am unused to so much natural light. Perhaps I’ll go green.’
His joke went wrong. I could imagine him, having suffered a loss of heart, giving up the ghost and commencing to glow sickly green while the sky changed its signals through the window.
‘Leave me now,’ he said. ‘I’m all at sea. Thank you for coming. Come again soon.’
I dreamed of him in the next night, buried at sea, wrapped in his bandages, the striped tent of blue and white sky above, too late for the unconfusion of drowning.
I have seen, at the Tattoo on Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, soldiers erect and dismantle military encampments within minutes. Surely wedding brace with socket, handling articulated metal and fields of tarpaulin as though they were so much balsa and tissue, often in a high wind and always under floodlight, which bleaches out detail, they perform what is to the civilian observer a marvel. They know that they are doing nothing more than exhibiting what discipline has taught them. The advantages these soldiers had over Cora and me and Mrs Darbo, in the dismantling of the wedding, was practice. I have, the deaths being sudden, organised at short notice my husband and my son’s funerals.
Weddings are not wholly another matter. There are the same dull necessities, provision for the intake and evacuation of food. Funerals demand more spirits and richer meats. In this case, because there was no love involved, the process, while demanding, was not painful. The most intense emotion was in the end the chagrin of Mrs Darbo. What reason could we give to her for cancelling this occasion towards which she had worked with such blind zeal? I thought that the least we could do was go to see her. It was the day before the wedding. Cora and I and Lucas’s secretary had made many hundred telephone calls. The responses were various. Very few people asked why this had happened. The men mostly said, ‘Better now than later I suppose.’ Young women evinced the poignant disappointment of those who have planned exactly what they will wear; even the most unromantic young girls believe they will meet their future husband at a wedding. I placed one of those sad announcements in
The Times
.